Race for the Double Helix
Deoxyribonucleic Acid, DNA for short, is a molecule that has been one of the biggest mysteries of modern science. What is its structure? Does it contain the genetic code and if it does how is it used? These are some of the questions that puzzled scientist in the early fifties. Many scientists tried to figure out DNA but only four came close to answering the questions. Those scientists were James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin had university degrees in chemistry, she got her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cambridge University. During WW2, Franklin had made contributions to understanding the structure of graphite and other carbon compounds. After the war she joined the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris, where she was introduced to the technique of X-ray crystallography and became a respected scientist in this field. In 1951 she returned to England to King's College, London, where she upgraded the X-ray crystallography laboratory there to work with DNA
In 1951, 23 year old James Watson, an American, got in to Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Ironically Watson thought it was a good thing because he thought he would get all the glory when they succeed. Randall; first at the University of St. Maurice Wilkins was born in New Zealand but studied to be a physicist at St. They thought it would be possible to figure out DNA's structure with the evidence at King's College. Watson and Crick used a scientist research on paper chromatography to determine the ratio of nitrogen bases. and Watson had graduated from the University of Chicago at 19 and got his doctorate at 22. Watson had two degrees in zoology: a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in zoology and a doctorate from the University of Indiana. Crick had changed from physics into chemistry and biology, fascinated by the line "between the living and the nonliving. In 1962 James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for their finding the structure in 1953 of the structure DNA. It was Wilkins' idea to study DNA by using X-ray crystallographic, which he had already begun to use when Rosalind Franklin became a research associate for John Randall.
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